Cooking has always been Aimée’s preferred recreational activity, creative outlet, and source of relaxation. After nearly ten years in the professional cooking industry, she traded her tongs and clogs for cookie cutters and a laptop. Not surprisingly, she’s busier as a home manager and food writer than she ever was in the fine dining industry. Four years of passionate and real food blogging at www.underthehighchair.com opened the door to connect with and inspire many people, as well as prepare her for the editorial position at www.simplebites.net. She loves nurturing others in the kitchen, to help elevate cooking from chore to muse. She writes from the gastronomical hotspot of Montréal, Canada,where she lives with her husband Danny and sons, Noah and Mateo.

Simple Bites

The amount of salt, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and hydrogenated oil (trans fat) store-bought bouillon contains just isn’t something I want to feed my family. Why make a soup from scratch only to then add a highly processed ingredient?

You’d think that after six years I’d develop my own recipe for the rhubarb vanilla jelly, but here’s the honest truth: jelly scared me. Today I’m sharing a homemade jelly recipe that’s not actually that scary after all.

My natural first thought was marmalade, but it’s an awful lot of work and my time was decidedly short. Then I remembered citrus jam. It’s something I’ve made in the past with grapefruit to delicious results.

As a canner, it’s long been a great disappointment to me that there’s no way to safely preserve homemade caramel sauce so that it can be shelf staple and given as gifts. All that changed when I discovered fruit-based caramel sauces.